


Knowing

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Following
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-22
Updated: 2014-12-22
Packaged: 2018-03-02 18:23:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2821808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinkatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkatory/gifts).



Claire knew.

Joe was having an affair, he was having affairs in the plural, and she knew about it. Perhaps she didn't know right from the start but it didn't take long for it to dawn on her that he was cheating, because he was nowhere near as careful as he liked to think. He wasn't careful about anything.

There were perfumes on his clothes that weren't even close to hers, though that could have been explained away had it been the only clue she found. But then there were the tiniest smudges of lipstick he thought he'd wiped away from the very corner of his mouth and a woman's sweater she found in the trunk of his car, under the mat, down by the spare tyre where her wedding ring once fell to. There were lunches on his credit card, nights when he came home late, perhaps early the next morning, and if he said that he'd been working then she knew it was a lie. He wasn't working. He was having an affair. He was having multiple affairs. To be frank, she was impressed by his stamina.

When it came, it came as no surprise to her, which was precisely why she didn't leave. It hadn't been any kind of whirlwind romance they'd had between them, after all; she'd known him for three years, in passing, before they'd ever so much as agreed to a date. He was charming and seductive without ever seeming to try for it and she'd seen the way that women looked at him, from the freshmen right up to the faculty. She'd seen the way he returned their looks, whether he meant to do it or he didn't. His great love affair would always be with Edgar Allan Poe, she knew, but Joe did always like the ladies. She went into the relationship aware of that. She went in with a smile and her eyes wide open. She wasn't expecting monogamy from him, even after he proposed. She wasn't surprised to be right.

Claire knew they were mostly Joe's students. It didn't take a genius to come to that conclusion, and she wasn't quite so silly as to think Joe didn't see a sea of young, attractive blondes and find his eye was wandering. It was in his nature, she supposed, and she had no overwhelming wish to change him; he was attractive and intelligent and she enjoyed his company just as he was, perhaps because her complete acceptance afforded her her own short stretch of leeway. She asked herself if she felt threatened and concluded no, she didn't, not even a little, because she was the only one who saw him and accepted him just as he was. They gave each other something no one else could give. She was a professor of Psychology there at Winslow, and liked to think she knew her field quite well.

She would wait at home some nights, reading or with an article up on her laptop that she'd be toying with before submission. Sometimes Joe helped with her grammar, something about comma splices and split infinitives that irritated the literature professor in him even in scientific writing, though he did have a tendency to edit into British English. They lived there alone, the house large for just the two of them but she doubted that they would be alone for that much longer, not more than a couple of years because they did want a family, sooner rather than later despite their careers. In spite of their flaws, she believed they'd make good parents. Some nights, she mused on why she thought that.

When he came home, eventually, Joe knew there'd be no point to slipping past her; she'd be awake and know he'd done it, and so he'd bustle in loudly and leave his briefcase by the door. Sometimes he'd tell her he'd had to work, that papers didn't grade themselves, that his department head had asked him to fill in on another course, as though somehow the lie wasn't transparent and his work was somehow busier than hers was. Sometimes, he didn't bother with the lie, and she preferred that. He wouldn't say a word as he walked into the room and found her sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, or sitting curled up in a chair in his study with one of the books from his shelves. She knew he didn't like her to read them, which she supposed was why she did it. He knew the dislike was irrational and watching him force it down and hide it was somehow strangely thrilling.

Sometimes, they'd talk. He'd tell her about his day and listen patiently as she told him about hers, the testing she was doing, how any form of experiment involving young children was always a hugely protracted process involving too many false smiles and too much drained energy. And sometimes, they wouldn't talk. Joe would pour himself a scotch, pause then pour another for her and they'd drink together in silence. Joe would perch on the edge of his leather-topped desk and she would watch him across the room, his face lit by lamplight, angles and shadows like a classic gothic horror. When he thought no one was watching, the smile would always fade from his face. Joe was never what he seemed to be.

Claire knew. She knew because she'd read his book, as difficult as that particular task had been; he was an excellent teacher, wrote incisive articles, but his fiction was such a poor synthesis of every dark romance he'd ever read. Joe was frustrated, a little humiliated, irritated by his own failure as a writer. He was moodier beneath the bright veneer when the critics mauled him. And when the killings started, she supposed she knew. When his bad mood lifted, she naturally assumed that it was him.

He came home one night and he didn't smell of perfume. He left his briefcase by the door, threw his jacket over the back of the chair and he went to her, held out his hand for hers and pulled her to him from the chair. He didn't smell of perfume, he smelled of something else, something sickly and metallic beneath a hit of his cologne. He was insistent and she let him be but wasn't scared, even when he stripped her down and asked her to be still for him. He asked her to breathe as slowly as she could, stay quietly, let her limbs go heavy, let her muscles relax and her eyes close. He asked her to let him control her, tried to make it sound like it was all about control.

And she did it, just as he asked her to. His hands touched every part of her and she fought down each of her reactions as they came. He slapped her face and she let him do it though it stung. He entered her and she made herself relax around him, like a rag doll, like a mannequin, like some kind of toy though she knew that wasn't quite the point of this. She did it because she was fascinated by the notion of what he wanted. She did it because she wanted to know, just once, what it would be like to be his victim. 

The killing continued and Joe's mood was buoyant. She supposed she should have felt anxious, felt repulsed or terrified, but there was a kind of intrigue to it, something she couldn't quite dismiss as her professional interest. The sex when they had it was hot and rough, bruises on her arms and thighs where he moved her, where he gripped her, violent and thrilling. She wondered if he meant to kill her, and carried a knife in case some literary whim turned him in that direction. She wondered what he'd do if she followed him one night, and what she'd see if she did. And so she did it.

The first time, she found it was just a tawdry affair. There was a girl, early 20s, blonde and fairly pretty with a bubbly laugh who answered the door in tiny pink panties and a Winslow t-shirt cut off crudely above her navel. Claire felt vaguely dirty as she waited to see if sex was the only thing on the cards that night, and when Joe skipped out of the house, down the steps from the porch an hour later, the girl waved goodbye from the window. She looked suitably tousled but still very much alive. Claire wondered if what she felt as she started the car was disappointment or relief.

The second time, it was another affair. Joe went back to his office and Claire watched as he entered the building, as he held the door for a girl with long blonde hair and a sexy smile. His hand went to the small of her back to guide her to the stairs and Claire followed them in a few minutes later. When she listened at the door, the scene inside was obvious; her husband was screwing yet another of his students, another in a very long line that would have practically stretched right around the block. She went inside, swept the door open with all the drama she could muster and then stood there, watched as Joe stopped cold with the girl bent forward over his desk.

"Claire..." he said, while he was still inside the girl.

She shook her head and flashed them both a wry little smile. "Don't flatter yourself that I didn't know," she told him. And she took the book she'd left there on his shelf days before, the act deliberate, just in case she needed an excuse. She turned to the door then decided abruptly that no, absolutely not, why should she? She settled on his couch instead, crossing her legs at the knee. They looked at her. She looked at them.

"Claire?"

"Oh, don't mind me," she said. "You two carry on. You're just getting to the good part."

Joe's expression was less than impressed and there was a moment when Claire wasn't sure if he'd stop or he'd snap. The girl muttered something about it being best that she leave and that apparently made the decision because Joe twisted his hand into her long blonde hair and he pushed her down, held her down, and started to move again as he looked at his wife sitting there across the room. The girl clearly wasn't happy with the situation, but she moaned and mewled despite herself, her cheek pressed to the desktop and her face all covered in her hair. Joe fucked her harder, his thighs slapping against the back of hers, pulled her up almost just by her hair until she propped herself up on her hands against the desk. Joe's hands went around, pulled up her top, pulled the band of her lacy black bra up over her breasts and exposed them, let them bounce with the force of his thrusts. And his gaze didn't leave Claire for an instant. She couldn't recall the last time she'd been so thoroughly turned on.

In the moment that he came, the sound he made then so familiar, she swept from the couch and she left, practically ran back down to the car. They never spoke about it.

The third time, she was sure that it was something more. She watched him enter the house. She saw no lights turn on inside. She didn't see him leave but he must have, somehow, right under her nose. When she returned home he was already there and he didn't ask where she'd been, just looked at her from his seat at his desk and put down the fountain pen he'd been writing with. She could see on his face that he thought that she knew. She could see he thought that she'd seen, and didn't know she hadn't gone inside. Her heart beat so fast she was close to dizzy with it.

She went to him, toed off her pumps and pushed him back by his shoulders as she settled herself on his desk, one calf dangling at either side of his. He rested his hands on her thighs, ran them under her skirt, finding with a quirk of his brow and a flicker of a smile that she'd abandoned her underwear beneath. She wrapped her hands around his throat as he fucked her, and she looked him in the eye. She wouldn't be playing dead for him again.

The next day, she didn't check to see if the house where she'd followed Joe was where the next girl they found was killed, but she was sure of it in spite of that. She knew it was Joe. And so, when Ryan Hardy came to her, she told him to speak to her husband. 

Three days later, she was meant to be staying away, in a hotel in DC for a conference she'd been looking forward to for months. It turned out to be just a dull and dismal disappointment and so she came home from it early, arrived late in the evening so she wouldn't have to brave another tedious breakfast with her fellow delegates. She took a taxi from the airport. There was a light on in Joe's study as she paid the driver and made her way to the door, though it was well past midnight; when home, he was always in bed with a book by 11.

She thought it would be a girl, the latest in the endless procession of generic blondes who were all just a substitute for her, just like the others. She thought she'd be angry because this was her home and Joe had never, to her knowledge, violated that one last trust they had between them, but she thought she might watch them even so, though she might give Joe directions, thought she might find at least some amusement in it as the unexpected spousal voyeur. But it wasn't a girl. When she walked in on him, Joe was screwing Ryan Hardy.

They were both half dressed, clothes in disarray, jeans shoved down over hips and shirts pulled up, hands everywhere. A glass of scotch lay spilled across the desk, probably staining the leather in a way Joe would curse in the morning because he had a higher regard for that desk than he did for most people. Ryan leaned over the desk and Joe pushed up behind him, inside him, muscles working slow and hard, hands gripping tight at his hips. Claire slammed the door behind her. They both looked up at her; they were both so drunk they shouldn't have been able to stand there, let alone screw.

She wasn't angry and Joe could tell because Joe could always tell. The bastard laughed, and that set Ryan off, and she shook her head and went over to join them. Joe kissed her as he pushed into Ryan, again and again. She guided his hips. Then she took off her boots, peeled off her jeans, and she settled on the desk in front of Ryan. The dark look on his face was familiar.

None of them spoke about it after. They didn't speak about Ryan joining them in bed that night, about Joe moaning up against Claire's vulva as his tongue flicked out, as Ryan fucked him deep and hard. They didn't speak about the morning after, when Claire got herself off as she watched them jerk each other, on their knees there on the mattress, barely sober, naked, making out. They didn't speak of Joe cooking breakfast after that, eating eggs and bacon over a hangover. But all of that was there behind their motives all along, and ever since.

Claire knew. And when the news broke that her husband was in custody, she'd already practiced her reaction. No one suspected. She almost convinced herself with it sometimes, but in the end she knew that she knew. She could have stopped it, and she didn't because she simply didn't want to. 

Ryan should have been Joe's replacement and it stung her when he left, thrilled her when she came back out of hiding and there he was, still hers. But Ryan changed, of course, toward the end. Ryan tried to fight his nature in a way that Joe had never managed to complete, aspired to become something better, though she knew that could only be temporary at best. She'd seen Joe try it and she'd seen him fail, and Ryan _was_ Joe, that was the appeal. As soon as his fragile morality finally collapsed, she'd be back again. He'd love her just the way that Joe had.

She saw what was in Ryan from the first moment she met him. And she saw what was in herself.

Claire knew all along.


End file.
